Charles on… anything that comes along

I really want to like BT. It tries. But sometimes it seems to miss the point that the way to please customers is to do things that, well, please the customers.

Take the fact that 55,000 people have been scammed an average of 100 pounds each on their phone bills by Trojan diallers, which exploit holes in Internet Explorer and Windows to make your machine dial premium-rate numbers.

BT has so far blocked 1,000 such numbers. Laudable. But it will issue legal threats against any customers who don’t pay up, even though it admits some customers have certainly been defrauded. (And its blocking of the 1,000 numbers implies it doesn’t exactly think they’re above-board.)

As I point out in BT customers have to pay for £5.5m internet scam, the company made profits of 1.2 billion pounds last year. They have lawyers on the staff. Yet they’re not prepared to challenge the scammers who have obtained money by deception in court? Yet they will issue threats against their own customers?

Truly, if you were trying to turn a big company struggling to retain customers into a smaller one, that’s how you’d go about it.

(PS: you might think that this subject, affecting so many people, deserves more than 250 words at the bottom of p18, while the history of lettuce gets a double-page spread on 12 and 13. But I couldn’t possibly agree.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Quantum computing, and the continuing Trojan diallers scams (26 January 2005; score: 62.39%)
• More on PKRSER, aka Partygaming, and the credit card data it wants - and where you got scammed (28 February 2007; score: 60.11%)
• Network: Jasper Fforde vs the Trojan diallers of doom (21 July 2004; score: 57.5%)